Microsoft Launches A Redesigned News App

By Amit Chowdhry ● June 20, 2018

Microsoft Launches A Redesigned News App

Today Microsoft announced that it has launched a Microsoft News app for Android and iOS. Rebranded from MSN News, the Microsoft News app will power the news on Microsoft Edge, the News app in Windows 10, Skype, Xbox and Outlook.com.

Microsoft News represents the ways we keep people informed across the web, phone and PC, using our long-tested approach of curating news via publishing partnerships, human editors, and AI, said Microsoft News editor-in-chief Rob Bennett. We work with more than a thousand premium publishers and more than 3,000 brands in all major global markets  like USA Today, The New York Times, FOX News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Welt, El País, BBC News, Kyodo News, and many more  to aggregate the best news, videos, photos and other content and deliver it, for free, to people all over the world.

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Every day, publishers will send over 100,000 articles, photos, and videos to the Microsoft News team. And a machine learning algorithm will scan that content to determine which categories and topics it should be placed in. Then it will be sorted by popularity and sent to over 800 human editors across 50 locations. And the editors will utilize algorithms to pair photos with the content.

Screenshot of the Microsoft News app for Android and iOS

The Microsoft News app can be personalized with your favorite topics on MSN.com or by selecting topics that you want to follow in the news feed on the Microsoft Edge Start page and on apps on Windows 10, Android, and iOS.

Through the app, you will be able to configure breaking news alerts, turn on a new dark theme, and set up integration with Android and iOS widgets. Another useful feature is continuous reading, also known as infinite scrolling.

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In the announcement, Microsoft acknowledged that a well-funded press is a critical part of our social fabric. And in the last four years, Microsoft delivered over $600 million back to publishers.

“Diversity, in our newsroom and in the publishers we partner with, is a key ingredient of the Microsoft News experience. We carefully compose our pages every day to present multiple sides of a story and consciously curate a wide variety of opinion pieces so that our readers can explore issues via new and different perspectives,” Bennett added. “We believe thoughtful opinion pieceswhich we clearly mark as suchhelp readers better understand the news. With that goal in mind, were always assessing our network of partners to ensure that we provide the most diverse, credible and well-rounded content available.”

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